Another center of struggle against Soviet power arose in the east. Thousands of Czechoslovak prisoners of war were being transported by train to Vladivostok to be shipped to France to join the war against Germany and Austria. On May 17, 1918, they revolted and took Chelyabinsk. Moscow ordered all soviets from Penza to Omsk to disarm the members of the so- called Czech Legion, but the legionnaires rejected the demand. On May 25, the Czechs took Mariinsk and by June 8 they held Novonikolaevsk (now Novosibirsk), Penza, Syzran, Petropavlovsk, Kurgan, Omsk, and Samara.93
During World War I the Czechs and Slovaks had refused to defend the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and had surrendered to the Russians en masse. By the end of the war there were close to 200,000 Czechoslovak prisoners in Russia. The Czech Legion had reached the strength of 50,000 soldiers and officers. Under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, the Soviet government was required to disarm the legion. The Czechs gave up some of their arms but hid the rest.
The Czech revolt gave a powerful impetus to the anti-Bolshevik movement east of the Volga. On August 6 Kazan fell. The Czechoslovaks needed only to cross the Volga and the road to Moscow would have been open to them. For the first time since the October revolution, the Soviet government was threatened by a truly dangerous foe. The creation of a regular army became a necessity. Until then, scattered uprisings by disparate opponents of the Bolshevik party in the borderlands of the old Russian empire had been crushed by semiguerrilla Red Guard detachments and units of the Red Army still affected by a revolutionary zeal which did not readily accept authority. The forces of the Cheka had sufficed to crush a number of peasant revolts. The Soviet newspapers of spring 1918 are full of information about this.94 The extent of repression can be judged from documents published by the Soviet authorities concerning the executions that followed the crushing of the July 1918 uprising in Yaroslavl. After the city was retaken "fifty- seven people were shot on the spot." Then a "special investigating commission" subjected hundreds of people to "an exhaustive interrogation" after which it was "discovered" that 350 people "were the ringleaders of the conspiracy and had had relations with the Czechoslovaks." The entire "gang of 350" was shot "by order of the commission." Ten more were executed after a further investigation conducted by the Cheka of Yaroslavl. The Red Book of the Cheka gives a very candid account of the suppression of the Yaroslavl insurrection, which lasted from April 6 to April 21. Latsis relates that 106 of the conspirators, and an armored division that went over to their side with two armored cars, held off the assaults of the First Soviet Regiment of the International Detachment and a Left SR unit for a long time. The suppression of the Left SRs in Moscow, it should be noted, did not stop them from supporting the Soviet side in Yaroslavl. After an artillery barrage, with an armored train from Moscow taking part, "a large part of the city was consumed in flames." Then the city was subjected to air bombardment with "bombs of the highest destructive power." The following ultimatum was presented to the besieged city: all its inhabitants must leave or "it would be subjected to a merciless hurricane of fire by heavy artillery, and also chemical shells."95 Such methods of warfare were not successful when the well-trained and disciplined Czechoslovak troops appeared, however.
The Central Executive Committee proclaimed the republic in danger. Trotsky, appointed people's commissar of war, took on the task of creating a regular army. Earlier than the other party leaders, including Lenin, Trotsky understood that dreams of "the people in arms" or of the army being replaced by the militia were nothing but Utopia. He based the new army on two principles: the employment of military specialists, and terror. It was obvious that an army could not function without professionals and equally obvious that the officers of the tsarist army had no desire to serve the Bolsheviks. Trotsky ordered the mobilization of former officers and NCOs. Refusal to join the army meant internment in a concentration camp; in addition, the families of officers were taken hostage. Fear had an important role in Trotsky's theoretical system. "Intimidation," he wrote, "is a powerful [instrument] of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands."96 Trotsky's terms individuals and thousands were merely figures of speech: in reality it was a matter of millions and tens of millions. Nevertheless this passage can be accepted as a clear statement of the concept of terror on which the Soviet Republic was founded. It was necessary to kill some in order to shatter the will of the rest.
After the fall of Kazan, Trotsky left for the front and signed an order with the following warning: no mercy for the enemies of the people, the agents of imperialism, or the lackeys of the bourgeoisie. He warned that in the train of the people's commissar of war, where the order was drafted, there was a standing revolutionary tribunal with full powers and that in Murom, Arzamas, and Sviyazhsk, concentration camps had been set up. Having reached Sviyazhsk, on the west bank of the Volga across from Kazan, Trotsky reorganized the Fifth Army. Showing his fist of steel, he ordered the commander and the commissar of a regiment shot because they had retreated without orders. The execution of the commander did not produce any commentary; that of the commissar (a man named Panteleev) was a real sacrilege in the eyes of the Communists because one of their own had been shot. The incident was discussed throughout the civil war; later it was used to demonstrate Trotsky's "Bonapartist aims."
Trotsky's pitiless feat yielded the desired results. On September 10 Kazan was retaken. By the beginning of October all of the Volga region was in the hands of the Red Army, which at this point numbered more than half a million men. By the end of the year, the figure had passed one million. The army's character also changed. Commanders were no longer elected, they were appointed. Soldiers and commanders took an oath written by Trotsky. It began, "I, a son of the working people," and ended, "If I violate this oath, may the merciless hand of revolutionary law punish me." The creation of this mass professional army took place under the slogan of world peace. 'The objectives of socialism," wrote Trotsky in the preface to his plan for the creation of the army, "is total disarmament, perpetual peace, and fraternal collaboration among all of the earth's people's."97
A mass professional army could not function, much less fight, without military specialists. Trotsky created a revolutionary army with the same officers who the day before had been denounced as enemies of the revolution. Only a small number of officers and generals willingly served the Soviet government. One of the first to join the Red Army was General Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, who had commanded the Northern Front and was the brother of Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, the administrator of the Council of People's Commissars. Trotsky gave him the task of organizing a general staff. General N. M. Potapov, who had crossed over to the Bolshevik side even before the October revolution, was appointed second in command of the army and put in charge of Field Headquarters, the Stavka.98